


Puella Furia Dark Magica

by DARKMAGIC313 (power464646)



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Alternate History, Alternate Universe, Deconstruction, Gen, Semi-crackfic, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:07:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28465053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/power464646/pseuds/DARKMAGIC313
Summary: In a universe with an inexplicably accelerated heat death on the way, the Incubators are forced to become far more experimental with their contracts.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 17





	1. Inkstain Panic Stricken Five-Star Heathens

"This self-centredness is ingrained in human nature. It can be overcome but it needs constant conscious effort to overcome it." -Tim "Exile" Shaw

* * *

2008 was a long year.

By the end, people were rather fed up with it as they might have been before with lice or heavy traffic. Not that they particularly disliked the year - they recognised its merits, they understood it served its purpose as a follow-up to 2007, and so forth - but it lingered in a frustrating way. Most people had figured out the point back in May or June, and the remainder thereafter just seemed like worthless filler.

"We kind of get the gimmick now, it's not really that funny anymore," everyone thought. "It's hard to believe that the same inexorable progression from past to future that would give us such masterworks as early-mid February and last Tuesday would deliver something so mediocre."

The passage of time gave eventually, as it was wont to do. "Fine," it conceded, "you can have 2009, but just this once."

And it was so.

2009 still a few hours away, but its looming presence palpable, four and a half million pairs of eyes and ears took in the pyrotechnic display over the heart of Sydney. One pair of eyes about ten kilometres North belonged to Marie Crawford. The other pairs of eyes belonged to other people, but that much wasn't out of the ordinary.

Marie sat out on the balcony to her family's Seaforth home, her fingers drumming nothing in particular on a small iron table next to her. Throughout the city, thousands of people clung to annually-incurred superstitions of turning over a new leaf, or of discarding the old one. Many more simply saw it as an opportunity to drink, try to get with somebody, fail miserably, go home, and pass out. A few took it as an opportunity to attend celebrations from which they derived no enjoyment, hosted by people they didn't respect, to obey lines of social etiquette they only pretended to understand. Marie grinned slightly at a deep contempt she harboured for all of them. These people stood at crossroads in their lives, held there by a centre of gravity hanging on the brink of an uncertain future. If not, then that was what they chose to believe. Marie, however, was entirely certain about one thing:

She was really, really bloody bored.

Her parents had left the house to she and her brother - they were out at a party with their peers in the upper class, all of whom were making a conscious effort to pretend not to hate each other. At that moment, in fact, her mother contorted a grimace into a smile while a friend from high school gushed to her about the beauty of a child-free life, while her father disguised a wince at hearing how the man to his side pronounced "hors d'oeuvres".

Her brother, not too long thereafter, had snuck away to a party of his own, with little more than a string of monosyllabic grunts farewell. This had left the house to Marie and the Incubator. That much was fine by her. She hardly cared to share a room with any other member of her immediate family, and did, quite despite herself, enjoy his company.

She listened out to the telltale pitter-patter of his approach on the tiled floor behind her. "Another year, and still no contract," he thought aloud in the most literal way possible. "You continue to prove yourself full of surprises."

"Damn, dude," she groaned. "Where have you been all night? I've been getting lonely out here, and the party down the street is playing Walking On A Dream again. If I have to listen through it one more time, I'm going to lose it."

"It's generally a very low-activity night." He punctuated his statement by leaping onto the table - an action feline enough to convey a shrug (any sufficiently feline action carries the same meaning as a shrug). "Too many adolescent girls are intoxicated to form contracts right now, so we usually leave this night to recuperate and prepare for the year ahead."

"Seriously? You're ever the gentleman, huh."

He smiled. "Humans would think it impolite if we formed a contract with someone who has reduced control over their mental faculties. That much, I suppose, makes sense, but it does beg the question as to why humans recreationally poison themselves to deliberately hinder their decision-making skills."

Marie shrugged. "Welp. Like you always say, it can't be helped."

"It can't be helped," he concurred, with the well-practiced illusion of enthusiasm.

Marie slumped elbow-first on the table forcefully enough to knock over a novelty sparrow-shaped candlestick which had otherwise sat undisturbed and unused in the middle of the table from the moment her mother had bought it. The motion-sensitive light in the corner behind her flared to life. 

"So, what? When you realised I was sober you came here? You don't think I'm gonna make a contract anytime soon, right?"

"Admittedly, you've held out in the face of our offer for an anomalously long amount of time-"

She scoffed. "What, three years? Four?"

"Four years, correct." He righted the candlestick with his ears, eye contact unbroken all the while.

"Wow."

"...But where emotions are involved, it would be a bad idea to assume we can extrapolate the future from past results. Besides, the threads of fate have only tied themselves tighter around you lately. You have so much potential now that you'd have to be a fool not to at least try finding a constructive use for it."

"Is that so?" She cracked a sheepish grin.

He didn't move in any manner that would suggest an acknowledgement of the question.

"What changed?"

"Developments in the global economy." He strutted the circumference of the table around to her. "Normally, in older eras of humanity, the power you wield over the lives of others would be reserved for duchesses and queens. However, what with the vast shift in power structures worldwide in the last century, that power now belongs to heiresses to real estate quasi-empires like you."

"You mean capitalism?"

"From what I can understand of the admittedly very human situation regarding housing in the United States, yes! Your parents are taking advantage of the financial collapse over there to amass more power in its market while essentially remaining unaffected here."

"Damn. How much studying of 'human situations' did you have to do just to give me that spiel?"

"None at all. I've sealed contracts with enough humans directly affected by such matters to understand secondhand."

"Oh," mumbled Marie. She was too rich to dwell on that.

"So... you got any resolutions, li'l guy?" She cleared a dry chuckle from her throat and stroked his head.

"We have reason to believe we're close to determining the cause of the dark energy discrepancies in our latest measurements. We intend on doing so as soon as possible, and the next three hundred and sixty-five days would be a likely time frame for our investigation to conclude."

"Oh, good for you!"

"Good for the observable universe, if all goes well."

"Yeah, that too."

She looked out at the city skyline. She almost missed the feeling of being a child, where each year seemed to last an eternity and a new one was something to be celebrated. Like, really, _actually_ celebrated. Back when she was, like, four or something, and her parents would take her down to the edge of the city to watch the fireworks from the roof of the family car. The key word, however, was "almost", and she knew her past self's blindness to the less enjoyable parts of life were not so much an indicator of their absence as they were the fact that a four-year-old is rarely an optimal judge for the quality of living.

This was a sign of Marie's dangerous closed-mindedness. The body of the Incubator before her, as it happened, had only been manufactured four years ago, and he was far more capable of assessing her happiness than she was.

"And you?" Kyubey implored in a display of rhetoric that could bring the depths of the uncanny valley to a limp sag.

"Hm?" Marie blinked at him for a moment. "Oh, right. You mean a resolution?"

Again, he made no indication that he had so much as heard her.

"Yeah, I think this year I'm gonna form a contract, become a magical girl, and fight witches in exchange for a wish."

"I'm sure that were I capable of feeling emotion, I would have found such a joke deeply humorous."

"Thanks, Kyub. You're a real one."

He tilted his head to one side. "That said, you've almost reached biological maturity, after which point your body will be firmly locked in as a human one. Therefore, if you did have any intention of fulfilling a wish, this year is the last chance you'll have to do so. Beyond that, your emotional output will no longer be of any use to us."

"Shit. This is it, huh?"

"That's correct," he nodded as matter-of-factly as a prideless being could.

"Man, where the hell has the time gone...? Everything feels like it changes so quickly, you kn- well, I guess you've been around for eons, so obviously _you_ know."

"All a common feeling that comes with your stage of life. Of the millions of adolescent girls we have sought out in our time on Earth, almost all have shared the sentiment."

"That's not entirely reassuring, actually."

"It wasn't meant to be. It was a fact I thought you might have found interesting." He smiled again.

"I didn't," she shrugged.

"That was a distinct possibility as well."

Dissatisfied with the quality of conversation, and still bored enough to generate sufficient emotional energy to tack a few billion years onto the lifespan of the stars in the Local Group, Marie turned and walked indoors, downstairs to the kitchen. Kyubey ran beside her to keep up. It was cooler in than out, although Marie didn't really mind the summer evening heat. It was more the humidity that frustrated her, always leaving her lips dry and her hair a mess. That and the mosquitoes, but she'd had the foresight to plant a couple of mosquito coils along the balcony before sundown.

"So. Remind me... what's dark energy, again? I get that it's two thirds of the observable universe-"

"-and counting," the Incubator interrupted.

"Right. But what does it _do_?"

"Simply put, it speeds up the expansion of the universe. This is problematic to our ends because the faster the universe expands, the more thinly spread all its energy becomes, and the quicker the cosmos dies a cold, empty death."

"Ah, gotcha. That's... very bad." She threw open the refrigerator door, the pale glow of its interior light barging forcefully into the darkness that had found a home in the otherwise unlit kitchen.

"It's pessimal," he nodded, "and it gets worse by the moment for reasons we don't understand. We hope your species thusly understands the inconvenience."

"What, your slaughter of teenage girls the world over, for hundreds of thousands of years?"

"Millions, actually. It is admittedly very inconvenient."

Marie fished out a bottle of sparkling grape juice from the fridge and shut its door behind her. The darkness in the room went back to minding its own business. "Fair enough, I guess." She pulled a glass from a cabinet under the kitchen bench, filled it partway, and sipped it thoughtfully.

"Eugh! It's flat as hell..."

"What appears to be the problem?" Kyubey cocked his head to one side with practiced mechanical precision.

"It says it's 'sparkling', but it's lost all its sparkle! The juice is _lying_ , Kyubey!"

"You can blame entropy for that."

She put her glass down by a pair of salt and pepper shakers shaped like embracing lovers and scanned the darkness for a pair of luminous red eyes to glare her frustrations into. "C'mon, dude. You don't mean...?"

"You know, we have a common dissatisfaction with this entropy, and a mutualistic solution to it."

"Can I blame entropy for you being a snide little bitch who needs to have a comeback to everything I say?"

"Absolutely. In fact, there's a very fast way you can make me stop."

"...Jeez. How many times have we had this conversation before?"

He turned his head to an odd angle for a moment, before his glare snapped right back onto her. "Three hundred and thirteen."

Marie nodded, returned glass to hand and, with a feeble gyration of the wrist, conjured an anticlockwise flow of a pensive absentmindedness. She lost herself in thought. She bit her lip, allowed herself a moment of quietude, and downed the drink once partly consumed by entropy, now wholly consumed by her.

"There's a high-class witch hunt to the southwest of the Central Business District," the Incubator interjected into her solace. She half-choked on the upsettingly inert concoction at the reminder that he was still there at all. "It seems to be connected to a loose end we've been trying to tie up for weeks. If you want to go and watch it, I'd estimate the window of time to get there hasn't closed yet."

Marie beamed. "For real? Why didn't you tell me earlier? Let's go!"

She was ever the thrill seeker, in the same way that an extreme sports player or storm chaser was. What set her apart from the pack, however, was that she found excitement in watching magical girls do battle against witches. Far more dangerous than most, of course, but she had learned over time to prepare for almost every eventuality.

Up in her bedroom, she double-checked the contents of her bag she carried to such occasions. A spare house key, a Swiss Army knife, a small first-aid kit, a skateboard helmet, two kneepads, and a dogeared paperback notebook were nothing to write home about, of course, but they proved themselves useful more often than not. What's more, she had a lacrosse stick. An ENCHANTED lacrosse stick! She tossed it from hand to hand, its weight as natural a channel for her strength as a third arm. With the non-magical variant alone she had proven the pride of her high school time and again!

Well, until that bitch Macquarie had suddenly started beating her in every game. But Macquarie must have been cheating somehow. Macquarie always cheated.

"So, this loose end you were talking about a minute ago," she offered as basis for a conversation. He refused it.

"It's not exactly relevant to your end of tonight's events, and explaining it would just slow you down."

"Slow me down?"

"The next city-bound train leaves in seven minutes. You can make that, but you'll need to hurry."

Marie slung her bag over her shoulder.

"It's better for your back to wear it on both shoulders."

She took the hint but made no act of pretending to enjoy it. "Gosh! What are you, my _dad_?"

"Not really."

"It was a rhetorical question."

"It was a rhetorical negative."

There was no point arguing with that, so Marie stooped enough for him to climb on his shoulders and left the matter - and her room - at that.

"Alright, Kyub," Marie finally allowed a grin to pass across her face like the shadow of a cloud in high wind, just as she locked the front door on her way out. "Let's get going."

* * *

THINKING ALOUD

Telepathy (rarely known also as "mind-to-mind communication") is the process of the transfer of information from one mind to another. Usually, this is conducted with a willing Incubator body acting as proxy, although sapient entities with an externalised soul are capable of sharing thoughts at a slightly reduced bandwidth. In effect, if entities A and B are to communicate, the information from body A's central nervous system is retrieved by soul A's ideal system, transmitted to soul B's ideal system, and stored in body B's central nervous system. While this does allow for faster and potentially more secretive communication, many merits of non-semiotic communication (that is, communication of pure ideas rather than symbols such as words or gestures which stand in for those ideas) are vastly overlooked. For example, telepathy has allowed for perfectly fluent communication between magical girls from societies which had never met prior, as well as therapy for girls suffering from dysphasia or dyslexia.

Telepathy arose as a consequence of first contact with the Incubators some two million years ago, but the capacity for it is innate in all beings sapient enough to imagine and desire to communicate abstract concepts. Humans, however, weren't aware they had the capability to do so until the interlopers offered their own hive mind to act as a transmitter and receiver, much in the same way that a human born and raised in a blue room would be unaware of their own ability to see the colour red. Most still aren't.

The single most famous telepathic message was most likely the first message sent between disability rights activist Adelaide Sterne (1965-1982) and philanthropist Sylvia Carlos (1946-1989) on the 30th of January, 1979. Carlos transcribed it later as, "I can't hear, and I can't talk. But I don't need to do either when my mind is so much sharper than their tongues."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Hey guys! I figured with the new year (and with PMMM's tenth anniversary in just a week, holy crap!!) I ought to try something new. No idea how this is going to work or how long it's going to take but finding out should be half the fun eh? New chapter hopefully every other Friday, I think I can manage that pace.)


	2. Eye on the City like a Cyclone

"One girl's single simple act of kindness can overcome even the deepest curse. I pray it will never have to." -L.M. García (translated from telepathic abstraction by Harriet Bentley)

* * *

By the time Hope Fearnley made it to Abject Permanence, it was almost midnight.

The pub had an older harbourside charm to it, wearing its seventies-style decor on its sleeve before quietly covering the sleeve up with a thick woolen jacket. Hope herself hadn't been here before, but since the majority of Sydney's magical girl population was on the less alcohol-related side of eighteen, licensed venues were a sort of neutral territory.

The first thing that greeted Hope was the smell - the unmistakeable pub smell of being forty-five years old and saying words like "bloke" and "mate" without the slightest hint of insincerity. Of course, the place was packed front to back on New Year's Eve, with the television over the bar broadcasting the live news from the harbour outside quietly enough to be unintelligible over the din of the customers, but loudly enough to make the overall hubbub just that ever-so-slight bit more annoying. A small group of people near the door shared a few drinks they could very well afford but secretly didn't want to, toasting "to a night we'll never remember!"

"Hey, Fearnley!" Someone thought loudly enough for her to hear. "I'm up the back, over by the window. Come on, let's talk." She recognised the voice, and briefly considered walking back to her apartment for the night and watching the fireworks from her balcony, leaving Sydney in the morning to move out into the country with Auntie Ruthy and her poor daughter Sarah never to return.

Better still, Hope mused while nonetheless trudging to the back corner of the room as if in a funeral procession, would be to leave Australia altogether. She'd never even left New South Wales before, but she believed that the people of Sydney were kind-hearted and beautiful, and that the dread her forthcoming conversation was going to elicit ought to be taken as far away from them as humanly possible.

"Fearnley!" The girl who had called Hope over exclaimed with mock surprise (or rather, Hope assumed it was mock, but she knew better than to take the most logical possibility for granted around... _her_ ). "Great to see you, homegirl! Take a seat."

"I'd rather stand," Hope muttered.

"No, you wouldn't." Her smile spread almost mechanically, and each syllable out of her mouth reminded Hope of the time when she was seven and had accidentally applied a stapler to her own hand. "Take. A. Seat."

Hope pulled out a chair and deflated into it. "If I told you I came here thinking, 'gosh, I hope they don't send Lara tonight', would you believe me?"

Lara laughed. "Of course not! I'm great. I'm really just fantastic. Besides, most of us are a lot less... pleasant... to negotiate with."

Hope rolled her eyes and shrugged. She was not, under any circumstances, to fall on the back foot. "This isn't a negotiation. I don't bargain with terrorists."

"Okay, okay, okay, okay... okay. First off, _I've told you_ , we're not terrorists. I've got a pen if you need to get that down somewhere."

"Yeah? What's the difference between a Deeplighter and a terrorist?"

"The former tends to be prettier," Lara cackled. Hope couldn't believe her ears, but did anyway because it made life easier than the alternative. "Second off, some of my sisters are in need of housing. You've got a couple of apartments, _plus_ you're a big deal community leader-"

"We're already packed. Aren't you pretty well off anyway? Why don't you do something about it?"

"Out of the question. My parents wouldn't understand. My sister would, but that's almost worse in a way."

"And the other Sydney leaders?"

"They're aristocrats, Fearnley. They practically spend their free time rehearsing excuses for this kind of thing."

"True enough," Hope groaned. "Still, though. Deeplighting is extremism, and I ain't gonna accommodate it."

"God, you're such a liberal. What part of our philosophy constitutes extremism?"

"All of it."

"Name even ONE thing."

"For starters, the conquest of humanity and the slaughter of all dissenters."

"Shhhshhshshsshsshshsshhsh!" Lara urged when a waiter passed by to deliver a bottle of apple juice and a plate of fish and chips. "Not so loud! I- Oh. By the way, I didn't get you anything to drink. Kyubey said you were gonna pick out something alcoholic, and I'm seventeen so..."

"No worries, I had dinner earlier."

"You know," she took to trying to remove the juice's lid, to no avail, "you really shouldn't drink. Do you know how many health problems it's linked to?"

"Probably nothing I don't already have."

"You'd be surprised."

"What, about the alcohol, or just in general?"

Lara half-winced, and the lid came ever so slightly loose. "Bit of both. The world's a surprising place."

"I'll drink to that," Hope concurred, and then didn't.

"Anyway, where were we? Oh! Right! Yeah, yeah, yeah, the conquest stuff. I mean what does it matter? You HAVE to admit that a bunch of people with reality-warping powers designed to spread love and hope would do so much better in charge than all the current governing bodies in the world and stuff, right?"

"Sure."

"And I'm more of a 're-education' kinda girl on the slaughtering front."

"Fair enough."

"So what's the problem?"

"The problem is that humans outnumber us several dozen THOUSAND to one, and that trying to usurp some kind of... political power from an entire species is genuinely maybe the quickest way I can think of to get all of us utterly eradicated."

"Not all humans would align themselves against us, don't be stupid."

"Not every majjo would team up with Attendants to the Deep Light, even if their life depended on it. Don't be stupider."

"Oh yeah? Name one who wouldn't."

"Me."

"Name two."

"Me, and Denise Montgomery."

"Name three."

"Me, Denise Montgomery, and Zoey Day."

"Name four."

"Bloody hell." Hope huffed. "The fact that you can't even run the numbers in your head proves you shouldn't be in charge of something like this."

"I've run the numbers, Fearnley. The numbers are standing at the end of the one hundred metre sprint, sweating and panting like nobody's business."

The lid on the juice bottle finally came off.

Hope rubbed her temples. "You could potentially be out there killing innocents who get in your way. And who knows if any of us would survive the backlash," she said.

"If they're in our way, they're not innocent," Lara said.

"A locust can eat its own body weight in a day!" The fun fact written on the inside of the juice's lid said, although nobody paid it any attention.

"You're missing the point. People are gonna die if you go through with this. Not just here in Sydney, not just in Australia - worldwide. Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions."

"And the same isn't going to happen if humanity maintains its current course? Is it not worth the risk, breaking free of all these structures of inequality and what-have-you? Aren't you tired of being a gazillionth-class citizen in your own country?"

Hope frowned. She wouldn't say this was "her country" as such - it was Dharug and Eora land, always had been. That was a semantic problem, though, a poor choice of words on Lara's part, and pressing it wouldn't magically keep people like her from massacring innocent bystanders. "What risk? It ain't a risk if there's a zero-percent chance of success."

"Zero? Oh, Fearnley, Fearnley. You underestimate me. What if I told you I actually had the capacity to do this? I'm on the cusp of wielding a whole new kind of magic. Nothing you'd understand."

"You know, everyone in history who's said that turned into a ruthless tyrant, a witch, or a violent mess of blood and scorch marks."

"Yes, yes, yes, because that was all _leading up_ to this! The world's changing, you know? It's the 21st century! The internet is connecting our people around the world! Our understanding of magic is so advanced now that the Holzknecht Taxonomy of Curses has been completely rewritten! There's an omnipresent god who brushes your teeth for you now! This is THE time to be a magical girl." Lara rolled her eyes and ughed a soft ugh under her breath. "Look. Maybe you want to compare me to some authoritarian radical or other, like Fierro, or Woronovska, or... what was that Yank called? Eighteenth century. Manipulated a ton of poverty-stricken prepubescent girls into dying for her. Name like Innes or Irvin or something."

"Her name w-"

"I don't CARE what her name was," Lara struck the table with her fist, hitting the edge of her plate and catapulting her fish and chips out the window. Hope glanced out after it to see a flock of gulls take to fighting over it.

"My point is... Fearnley. Fearnley! Look at me, I'm trying to talk to you. My point is, it's been centuries. We've moved on as a people. We've improved. Now we're at a tipping point, and in a couple more centuries we're gonna join the Incubator and all his friends among the stars. And we need someone to help our kind cross this one last hurdle. I think that someone is gonna be me."

"Wait. Is it a tipping point, or is it a hurdle?"

"It's both. It's like how a photon is a wave and also a particle."

"Is it like that?"

"No, it's not like that at all. I just made that analogy up. Come on, try to keep up."

"Is this a Deeplighter thing, or are you just going insane of your own volition?"

"I feel like you're not taking me seriously. Being a magical girl takes initiative, and courage, and a constant want to make the world a better place. We're the perfect people to do what we've gotta, you know? We chose this path."

"You're not telling me anything I haven't heard before."

"And do you agree?"

Hope didn't say anything.

"Oh! Ha, wow, you really must be the worst possible person in Sydney to have this conversation."

"You're the one who invited me here. Maybe next time you could think things through a little better beforehand."

"Maybe you could give my peers a roof over their heads," Lara scoffed.

"Maybe they could stop plotting domestic terrorism," Hope shrugged.

"A locust can eat its own body weight in a day," the bottle cap kept saying, and more forcefully this time, but still everyone ignored it.

Lara bit her lip and watched the gulls eat her dinner for a second. Then, without warning, she stood up, slipped her jacket on (black leather with the words "Do Not Resuscitate" embroidered on the back in golden Roundhand), and extended her hand to shake.

"Well, Fearnley, it's been a pleasure as always, but I can tell we're not getting anywhere."

Hope stood up and nodded. Lara hesitantly withdrew her hand. "Still, though. All the best from one 'majjo' to another. Have a happy new year, Fearnley."

"Same to you," she started absentmindedly, but Lara jumped out the window before she could finish.

Hope watched her sprint off through the crowd gathered along the harbour, all eyes on the fireworks minutes out from the countdown. She groaned and stuck her hands in her pockets. There was something in one of them, she noticed. Some round, cold piece of metal. Cautiously, she pulled it out and held it to the light. When she saw what it was, she flipped her phone open and immediately dialed Zoey.

"Hope, darl. What's the good word?"

"Auntie!" She snapped.

"What's wrong, girl? Ya sound spooked by somethin'."

"Did you know a locust can eat its own body weight in a single day?"

Silence.

"Auntie?"

"Lara's gotten into yer head, hasn't she? Gotcha thinkin' about somethin' weird."

Lara shared a confused glance with the bartender on her way out, who had apparently been watching much of the affair. "Oh... right. You knew she was gonna be here?"

"I told ya, darl! Phoebe's out huntin' tonight!"

"I think I would've remembered you saying something about that."

"Hrm. Well, I definitely told someone."

"Wasn't me, then."

"Why not?"

Hope lowered the phone for a moment to process the question.

"Sorry, what?"

"Ah, don't worry about it, darl. How far away are ya right now? The countdown's gonna be startin' soon. And endin' soon too, I s'pose, which is the important part."

"No worries. I'll be there on time. But for now I've gotta give Phoebe a ring, you know? Fill her in on tonight's brouhaha."

"Righto. See ya then, darl!"

"See ya!"

Click.

The tactile sensation of finality between thumb and red button served as a beat in Hope's thoughts, a fixed temporal point dropped like an anchor from the drifting of her reverie. Lara knew more than she'd let on, for sure, but she'd let on far more than Phoebe would have. It was a blessing and a curse, in a sense. If she was telling the truth, then Hope knew something was happening ahead of time, and could deal with that. But what time would that be? And what if it was a bluff? This early in Hope's leadership, failure to accept it could get people killed, or worse. Failure to call it, on the other hand, would have her dismissed by the others for overreaction, and the city would fall into the clutches of the incompetent, or the negligent, or... how had Lara put it?

"They're aristocrats, Fearnley. They practically spend their free time rehearsing excuses for this kind of thing."

That much was certain. But until she knew what was going on, her hands were tied and her mind was in the dark with room to dread and not an ångström more. Heavy was the head, of course. When she checked, though, she was glad to see that her worry hadn't dusked the lustre of her seafoam-green soul.

She called Phoebe as soon as she decided she was done with the line of thinking. Nobody picked up. She knew she should have expected as much, of course - true to the kick upside the laws of thermodynamics' head which magic proved itself to be, information could not escape a witch's labyrinth unless she willed it - but it unnerved her nonetheless for a reason she couldn't quite place. Perhaps the on-demand unavailability of an ambassador was disquieting in a way that political tensions she glimpsed beneath the curtain tonight seemed only to intensify.

Her head swam with possibilities. It felt like too much was happening at once to be purely coincidence. Her taking up the role of community leader. That sundowner who'd apparently blown into town last week, the one whose path she never quite seemed to cross. Lauren and Danika. Now whatever Lara was planning! She wondered if there was anything she was forgetting, or if she was tripping over an assumption intimating her in the wrong direction. There was the classic Holmes quote about eliminating the impossible, but even casting aside the undeniable truth that her mortal mind whose finitude filtered reality to a near-vacuum could never hope to account for every possibility and impossibility, she had no idea what mystery she was even trying to solve in the first place.

Hope meandered up the steps out the front of her apartment block. She was tired, that much was for sure. When she let herself in and ambled over into a slump on the stairwell handrail, old, varnished, and smelling of weed as it was, she decided that she was in no state to spend the rest of the night doing much more than stamping out the artefacts of misdirection which Lara's flagrant unreason seemed to bid to congeal in her mind. Lara had told her a lot of things, sure, but not what she hoped to achieve, or even what she was doing to get there. It was only as she began her climb that she realised how much work she'd have to do.

When she rounded the bend on the first floor, she weighed up the implications (or uncertain lack thereof, rather). It was possible that the Attendants to the Deep Light were up to something beyond the scope of her understanding. It was possible that her selection for her current role was made in the knowledge that she was doomed to failure. It was possible that the stranger from out of town was caught up in everything for all she knew. Beyond all this, and perhaps worse still, it was possible she was being goaded into a state of unstable paranoia. She couldn't do anything about those possibilities, though. Not with how little she understood.

When she reached her flat on the second floor, however, she decided it was _certain_ that something was amiss. There was quite a lot she could do about that.

* * *

ATTENDANTS TO THE DEEP LIGHT

The Attendants to the Deep Light is an organisation of extremist advocates for a global magicracy founded in 1955 in the city of Lyon, France by Laure Pinel (1938 - 1957), Jade du Bois (1939 - 1957), and Aurélie Durieux (1936 - 1957). Pinel and du Bois had acted as advisors to the previous ruler of the city, Liliane Petiere (1936 - 1955) for the entirety of her four-year reign prior before deciding that she was a tyrant who would have to be deposed. The two eventually devised a plan wherein the magical girls of Lyon would live in a state of post-scarcity at the expense of its human population. Durieux, an assassin hailing from Paris, later joined the duo in killing Petiere, who was found completely ossified in the floorboards of her office shortly after the discovery of her death.

The trio took the organisation's name from an ancient Byzantine poem by Julia the Voyager, which featured a powerful knight clad in brass armour which wailed like horns in the breeze. In the poem, the knight would wander eternally through a desert, looking to stoke a fire only referred to as the deep light. With the overwhelming majority of the poem seemingly lost to time, it's unclear what the name means, but the Lyonais cabal found the imagery striking nonetheless, and the name stuck.

Throughout the late 50s and early 60s, the Attendants became the world's most popular magicratic organisation, with some cities having as much as 15% of its magical girl population join its ranks. This expansion has been controversial in the eyes of many, however, particularly magical socialists, who claim that the the group fails to address the prejudices and inequality of most human societies and serves merely to maintain the very status quo they claim to challenge. Ironically, the original group was met with no such criticism - although this was primarily because nobody had noticed they'd replaced Petiere until two years after her assassination.

After the cleaning out of Petiere's office, a statue was erected in her honour just by the front door, although nobody knows who made it or why.

More pressingly, the rule of a purely magicratic society is challenged, disestablished, and covered up seamlessly in every instance where it arises by agents standing in for the Incubator. He has yet to explain why, but the most popular hypothesis is that this is an attempt to force the metamorphosis of the area's ruler who is, without fail, an abnormally powerful figure. The Attendants in particular have only ever assumed control of six cities worldwide and have yet to hold one for more than twenty months, but given the thoroughness of the cover-ups, it is currently unknown which six.


	3. A Tree in the Storm Like the Breath of a Child

"Beauty endures only for as long as it can be seen; / Goodness, beautiful today, will remain so tomorrow." - Sappho of Lesbos

* * *

One could say the train's passengers filed out quickly onto the city centre station platform in the same way that one might say phlegm filed out quickly from a coughing, hacking throat. Marie stumbled from the double door when it ejected a particularly violent splutter of rushing crowd, but much to her chagrin, the Incubator perched on her shoulder saw that as no sign to slow or pause the telepathic debate she had initiated to pass the time.

"How can you claim that a life as a human would be more fulfilling if you could perform feats in the span of a single contract that would take centuries of work otherwise?"

"I'm fine," she projected back in a haze of irritation once the bustle had slowed to a trickle and she could right herself. "Thanks for asking."

"You're avoiding the question."

"And you're being a real pain in the neck."

"My apologies." He smiled and jumped down onto the tiled floor. "Is that better?"

* * *

Staggering down the street with abnormal sobriety for a new year in Sydney was a young woman - no, she reminded herself. More specifically her name was _Thalia_ , just in case anyone asked (and nobody was going to ask! She didn't need to worry but just in case somebody did, she could rest assured knowing full well that telling people her name was Thalia was a skill she had under her belt) - who Kyubey found himself making even less ground with than Marie.

Thalia winced beneath the hood of her jacket as yet another firework let out a deafening flash too directly overhead for her liking. She wasn't the type to fit in. Maybe she was cynical to think as much, but in her mind there was little room for her to see eye to eye with other people. She was glad, then, that for once she had something in common with everybody else: being ensnared in the Machiavellian schemes of an extraterrestrial ferret wasn't her biggest concern at the moment.

What she found much more pressing by comparison was the fact that tonight the sky was frighteningly loud and bright at unpredictable intervals, which made thinking clearly close to impossible. She had to get to shelter of some form or other, and without being spotted. Being seen meant being hunted. Being hunted meant being killed, or worse-

"Hey, 'scuse me."

Thalia shivered when she locked eyes (or eye, in her own case) with the girl who had just tapped her shoulder. She adopted a fighting stance and gritted her teeth. The other girl withdrew her hand with a heedful calm, but if she registered Thalia's defensive hostility as a threat, she didn't show it. If anything, her expression softened.

"Sorry, sorry mate. I'm looking for a place called Abject Permanence, d'you have any clue where that is?"

Thalia racked her brain for the correct response. She knew what some of these words meant. Could she piece the rest together from context?

"I... I'm Thalia. My name is Thalia." She frowned. That was about the best she could do.

The other girl stroked her chin as if that single unambiguously true fact was enough to lose her in a quizzical daze. Thalia couldn't help but notice the silver ring on her finger studded with a small aquamarine and engraved with the name "Hope". She knew she should have taken the opportunity to turn and run - this was the closest she'd been to a magical girl without a fight - but the power this girl seemed to radiate was enough to paralyse her with fear, and as unassuming as she seemed, her soul must surely have shone with might and wisdom beyond her years.

"...Right. D'you speak English?"

Thalia wasn't quite sure what that meant, but it sounded like an accusation. She shook her head.

"Righto. Sorry for the bother," was all Hope said, and just like that... she left. That was all well and good in Thalia's book, but she might be back later. Hell, there might be more of them with her. It was best to keep on moving.

* * *

"But the act of _understanding_ myself is a gradual process that takes my entire life," Marie groaned through gritted... brain, she supposed. "If I cut it short, I'd paradoxically never find anything worth wishing for in exchange for that future. See?"

"Do you suppose you would be more enlightened in knowing what would make you happy and not achieving it than you would achieving anything you wanted with only an educated guess as to whether or not it could bring you long term happiness?"

Phoebe Deckard and Claudia James patiently watched the station entrance for the human girl Kyubey had said would be joining them tonight, but given the psychic ruckus she was causing, they needn't have bothered. Humans, Phoebe swore. No volume control.

The girl seemed to be engaged in a sardonic, bad-faith back-and-forth with the Incubator on her shoulder. It reminded her of someone, another human girl she met a long while ago, who wouldn't stop getting into annoying debates with him about making a contract. What was her name again? Something like...

"Marie! Marie Crawford!"

Marie looked ahead at the two girls down the road and the Incubator at their feet. The one on her shoulder announced, "I think we should postpone this debate. Phoebe has more important things to discuss with you than providing important philosophical questions for you to avoid. Also, this body should take its leave now. I already have one here."

Without another word, he flung himself into the darkness of the night and scampered to parts unknown.

Marie looked back at the two girls and strode over to them. "Do I know you...?" she began, but Phoebe raised a hand to cut her off.

"My bad. The name's Phoebe Deckard, but when we first met I didn't have this name or this body."

The Incubator took this as an opportunity to butt in with an explanation. "Phoebe stepped in to stop two enemy magical girls from killing each other. She wanted them to understand each other's point of view. To make a long story short, all three girls share the same body, gem, and for the sake of convenience, name now."

"...Wow. What's that like?"

Phoebe laughed. "I suppose it depends on which one of me you ask!"

Marie offered a small, polite chuckle, but Claudia doubled over like it was the funniest thing in the world.

"You good?"

Claudia turned her gaze up to meet the wall of mild contempt Marie's presence had become and went carnation red. She rose to salvage what dignity she could. "Sorry, it... it was funny."

It wasn't.

"It's cool, it's so cool you could hold it on a swollen eye and numb it," Phoebe cut in, and turned to Marie. "This is actually what I'm here for. I like to spend what little free time I have helping new girls find their bearings. Speaking of, I reckon we should probably get going, huh?"

* * *

Though it was growing late and he found himself accosted by the looming inevitability of sleep, Bill stayed as awake as he could. He was an artist, as it happened, and though she couldn't muster a single cent, the attentive looming of his biggest fan spurred him on to make manifest the visual abstractions of his thoughts and feelings he had set out to make. This, he believed, was his duty as an artist. This was his _raison d' être_, and even if he was only doing it for a penniless, quiet teenage girl with a tattered coat and a face only a mother who was looking at something else could love, then he was doing it nonetheless!

"This is what?" she grunted like a wooden door on loose hinges, and pointed with a six-fingered hand at a corner of his canvas.

"What's that? Ah, I don't know. That's the thing with art sometimes. You've just got to put something down because you feel it, not because you know it."

"Looks like home."

He squinted at the exact spot she was pointing to, and the two stayed almost perfectly in place for seventeen seconds like that.

"That's a stray splatter of yellow paint, son. I don't think it looks like anything."

"Looks like home," she insisted.

"If you say so! Keep yer pants on, kid."

She did just that, but she was going to anyway.

"Hey! Hey, excuse me!"

Unbeknownst to Bill, this was the second time a complete stranger had shouted this at his sole fan in the last twenty minutes, and the second time that stranger had been a magical girl. It was, perhaps, just as well that he didn't know, because learning this would have had no bearing on his life whatsoever and completely wasted his time.

His fan, however, saw no reason to stick around, or even look back at the girl who had called her - she didn't have anything to gain from checking to see who it was (after all, she didn't know anybody in the city), so she simply sprinted off into the night. While later she would realise that she could have turned to confirm it was her being addressed, the fact of the matter was that Thalia didn't need to be paranoid to believe that almost every magical girl in Sydney was after her. This was helpful to know, and seeing as she didn't need to be paranoid for this reason or in fact any other, she had opted not to be.

"What was that all about?"

The girl who had spooked Thalia away strolled over to where Bill had set up his canvases. "Sorry about that, mister, uh..."

"Oh! Um, Campbell."

"Yeah! Right. Sorry, mister Ohum-Campbell, but there's been word of a serial killer going about. I just thought when I saw your friend there, she fit the description we've got."

"Her?" He spluttered. "She wouldn't hurt a fly!"

"I'd be impressed if she could, though."

"How's that?"

"Insects don't feel pain, sir."

"Why'd she run off, then?" Marie scratched her chin all too melodramatically.

Bill hadn't noticed that the two other girls nearby were something of an entourage to the first rather than a part of the general crowd of the area.

"You'll excuse my friend Marie here," said the first. "She's trying to 'gotcha' over questions she already knows the answer to but you don't."

"No I'm not. I'm actually wondering. Do you have a reputation or something?"

"Look! Look. It doesn't matter why she ran away, I think we should give her the benefit of the doubt! It probably wasn't her anyway! And even if you two do want to track her down-"

Marie shrugged. "It's whatever, really."

"-We're heading in that direction anyway. Who knows! Maybe we'll come across her, talk a few things out, and figure out that this was all one big misunderstanding! Imagine the look on you two's faces when..."

Phoebe looked back and forth between her companions.

"You don't care about her, do you?"

"Nah."

"Not really. I thought we were looking for a witch."

"Excuse me," Bill said, very rudely interrupting what was clearly an important conversation, "but would you mind moving somewhere else? It's a busy night, and if someone wants to buy a painting they won't be able to get past ya."

* * *

Phoebe held up her soul gem, swirling with veins of red, gold, and green for her two companions to see. "Looks like this is the place!"

Bringing up the rear, Claudia helped herself under the caution tape across the entrance. "Seriously? Why an abandoned... what was this place, a car park?"

"Marie?"

Marie rested a fist on her hip and waved her other hand about. She'd been studying witches for years now, and felt she'd be doing herself a disservice if she didn't let herself answer the question as intolerably smugly as possible.

"Witches tend towards quiet, isolated back streets and abandoned buildings because they only ever want to get into fights on their own terms. Think about it for a second. If you were a witch, would you want to stick around bustling, crowded avenues where every magical girl could see you?"

"Oh! Oh, right. Of course. Sorry."

"Nothing to be sorry about!" Phoebe assured her. "I'd keep your voice down if I were you, though. We're getting close to the barrier."

The trio fell silent, save for the squeak of Phoebe's thick-soled boots where the concrete floor had begun to wear into rough spots. Marie was so caught up in the thought that she too would keep her voice down if she were Claudia, because she would have an unpleasant and grating one, that she almost completely missed the telltale shimmer of a barrier being revealed. The air before her seemed to collapse on itself and unfold into a mandala-like, mosaic kaleidoscope, radiant with the brilliance of its creator's fury.  
Phoebe took one deep breath and turned to face her companions. Though she was silhouetted against the light of the barrier, her soul illuminated her features enough to pronounce their graveness.

"Once we cross over, everything will be different. Space, time, the way we understand our reality... You know that, don't you, James?"

"Only in theory," Claudia admitted. "But... but I'm not scared! I'm ready!"

"Great to hear. Crawford?"

Marie delivered a particularly casual salute, and secretly wished Phoebe wouldn't call her "Crawford" again.

"Let's go, then. Into the belly of the beast!"

The three colours of Phoebe's soul spread outward, until they illuminated her entire body. Her form flickered and jittered and stratified itself into a red-green-gold mass and it shifted and spun and shaped itself into a wheel, caught in a motion as hard to follow as it was caught in its own fluid elegance. What Phoebe was now shaped the oscillation of the soul, like a potter, or an accretion disk, and a new shape sprung forth - that like Athena emerging clad in battle armour from the mind of her father.

Phoebe Deckard stood before them now, reality twisting to adorn her in short green robes ending in a steel-plated skirt, and light green armour upon her arms and upper body. Her soul gem now rested in three distinct pieces, with a brilliant emerald upon her chestplate and identically cut ruby and amber on either side of her collar. They seemed... off, somehow. Not that they were unusual, and in fact, seeming off was a deliberate function of many of mankind's greatest inventions of the last two centuries, such as the lightbulb or the electronic computer.

"The most important thing I've learned in my triplicated little life is which third of my soul to use when," she grinned, and a fern-green lance appeared in her arms. Although she'd seen her fair share in the past four years, transformation sequences were entirely unique, and the most spectacular still took Marie's breath away.

"My turn!" Claudia declared. Yeah, she transformed too, Marie supposed. It was decent.

The three girls took each other's hands and dove into the barrier, and a silence draped itself loosely across the forgotten parking space. Once she was certain she was alone, Thalia crept out from behind a concrete pillar. She wished she knew some curses so that she could whisper them to herself. She had been hunting the collector witch, and along came these happy-go-lucky hotshots and claimed the battle for themselves? How despicable.

She decided to stick around, though, just in case the witch killed them. She wouldn't wish death upon anybody, of course, but at least she extended that sentiment to herself!

Maybe the witch too, now that she thought about it.

* * *

A tunnel reaches on infinitely. The deeper it runs the more it uncovers.

Lines of festering rot fed upon by a thousand thousand thousand shifting tides of insects, framed in memories of indomitable hatred.

What is this place?

It is as it has always been.

What is this place?

What is this place?

It is as it has always been.

It is as it is now.

It loathes you more than you know how to loathe.

Should we really be here? This place feels

wrong.

You are welcome here

And you are most definitely not welcome here. Come in.

This place

This is the collection.

I don't belong to the world

so it must belong to me.

There's something wrong with the shape of this place.

Do you ever feel like you've just seen something you shouldn't?

Everything

Is that the way out?

There's something wrong with the shape of this place.

I know that isn't the way out.

is exactly

It's times like this I remember what my dad taught me.

Are you alright? You've gone rather pale all of a sudden.

Are you even listening to me?

where it needs to be.

What's this about your father?

What's this about your father?

What's this about

A long silence.

Possession.

Power for power's sake,

hypocrite.

And quirks. And oddities. And too many uncomfortable deviations where a mind fills in the empty spaces in a dream.

I don't dream anymore, do you?

Or maybe this is the dream. If this is the dream then the fact I haven't woken up is the ultimate testament to how much I hate myself.

Hypocrite. Hypocrite. Hypocrite.

My dad's in real estate.

Hypocrite. Miserable, lifeless hypocrite.

He used to teach me about building standards. It was a substitute for a personality, to him.

Streets and streets of memories.

You never stopped to ask me if they were good.

Streets and streets of self-reassuring falsehoods.

Some of it is a memory.

(Are you forgetting something?)

Most of it is a dream we have to reassure ourselves that we remember.

A light shuts off.

The dream is poison if you don't let yourself dream it.

Why do I

Some of it is a memory. The rest is just a backdrop.

Each building only has one normal side, is the thing. And they all lie in view of a single point.

Silence.

If I said I knew the way, would you believe me?

All the lights shut off. A door opens. Something is leaking out from behind the door. It's everything you ever loved.

Enter a bastard, twisted, mangled maelstrom of a body, all arms reaching at nothing, avaricious enough to dare to need.

I'm sorry.

When the truth of me is laid bare to them I am assailed. My arms are cut with a thousand swords so that I fall farther still from the world I want to reach. A lunatic fancies herself a hero and blasts my face apart with a shotgun.

I think she's right. And I hate how

(I'm sorry.)

There is welcome to be found in implements of harm - a familiarity in those designed to remove or distance or prevent. There is no such comfort or kindness to be found in a loving embrace as a hail of a hundred twisted arms reach for

get off me

You're worthless. If dust and ashes had a mind of their own they would pity you.

Do you hate me?

Yes.

You hate me, don't you.

Yes.

If you hate me so much, you should tell me.

I hate you.

The glint of steel reflects no light when the blade disrupts the shapely purity of my neck.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can say it so many times and it never ever feels like I fucking mean it. If truth is beauty you are all atrocious liars.

It's done.

* * *

There is a sweetness to familiarity with the mutual understanding of reality's underpinning logic when it takes the place of its own absence. The soft whistle of the summer night breeze. The flat, sour smell of a humid Sydney street. The eroded smoothness of the concrete ground and the soft shadows of city lights. No piece particularly outstanding on its own, but all connected through one rare and wonderful commonality: they made sense.

It was done, the witch was dead, and the trio were exhausted, but they were alive and unharmed. It was as if the weight of the labyrinth had been exchanged for that of the outside world again - a heavier weight, perhaps, but a far more bearable one. Marie let out a breath she never seemed to notice she held at times like these.

But time passes differently in a labyrinth, insofar as its creator wills, and the girls found themselves on the cusp of midnight.

"Wow," Claudia struggled to catch her breath. "That's... I don't understand any part of what just happened. That's a witch?"

Phoebe gave her a pat on the back almost firm enough to bowl her over. "Yep! A pretty tough one, too, but because we stuck together it was over in no time flat! Hope you had fun there, bucko, because this is your job now!"

"Magical... swordfights? Ha...ha... Alright. Do I get paid for it?"

"Sure do!" Marie picked the small black jewel off the floor and tossed it in Phoebe's direction. She fumbled and caught it. "Looks like you could get a few uses out of that one. Keeps your soul gem clean when you burn through it too much."

"Oh... that's good, I think...?"

"You get a hit in at all, Marie?"

"One or two, but all I've got is a lacrosse stick. Not exactly designed for turning the tide of battle, you know."

All three chuckled as they caught the last of their breath before Marie continued: "Thanks for tonight, by the way. I mean, it's getting late, so I should head out now. Gotta be back home before my parents, you know how it is."

"Go for it! Thanks for coming out all this way!"

"Ha! Hey, no problem. I had no idea you were this good at it! Sweet navigation skills back in the labyrinth!"

"Heh, I know."

A smile on her face and the usual dose of nightmare fuel in her mind, Marie turned and left at what happened to be precisely 11:59:50 P.M.

"Ten!"

Thalia leapt quietly from the roof of the building to the ground, careful not to be seen. Not to be seen *again*, she corrected. She was glad the human festivities were picking back up in intensity, despite the sensory overload it took much of her willpower to suppress. It suddenly didn't take much to disguise the sound of her footfalls under the crackling of pyrotechnics or the chant of its audience.

"Nine!"

Hope marched in through the front door to her apartment. Her flatmates cast quick glances away from the skyline to nod acknowledgement at her, before seeing the frustration in her eyes and looking back out the window again. Zoey let out a soft sigh of empathy. Hope paused before admitting the sigh of her own, not having realised she had held it in all this time. Danika's face lit up and draped an arm over Hope's shoulder. Hope beamed and braced for a new year where she could pretend something had fundamentally changed. As if by magic, she might have said.

"Eight!"

Ruth sat forward in her armchair, as if sheer force of will could clear the picture quality on her television. She cast her mind back to this day twenty-two years prior, before Sarah had wound up in that fight that left her in her current state. Before Graham - the right proper piece of shit - had announced that he couldn't love his own daughter anymore and run away. For sixteen years, New Year's Day had cemented itself in her mind as a family occasion, and it had never quite stopped feeling that way.

Then again, her daughter sitting silently by her side had always been the only family she ever needed.

"Seven!"

Lara stood up the back of the crowd by the Harbour Bridge, still grinning with relief. The countdown had been timed perfectly. Her sister had just asked her why the back of the jacket had said what it did, and she was mortified by the possibility - the All-Permeating Abyss in all its infinite dark majesty forbid! - that she would have had to provide an answer! Life wasn't about answers, in her opinion. Life was about a black leather jacket with "Do Not Resuscitate" stitched on the back.

Life was also all about flirting with Madeleine, she supposed, but at least Sisyphus took breaks to let his boulder roll down the hill. She could wait.

"Six!"

Hours later, on the other side of the world, Margaret leaned back in her diner chair whose creak in response suggested that it was the elder of the two. The look on the face of the girl across from her said she would really rather be anywhere else, but if she had any intention of speaking as much aloud, it was cancelled out by her embarrassment at the absurdity of her situation. Besides, the two of them had a very important job in the days ahead, and work only became more pressing in the festive season.

"You could at least get your feet off the table," she telepathized. Margaret pretended not to hear.

"Five!"

Wai-Fong braced herself a mere fraction of a second before she burst shoulder-first through the seventh-storey window and hurtled toward the street below in a shower of glass and blood (mostly not even hers!). Time slowed in freefall, and a jet of flame from the explosion spewed forth from her impromptu escape, very narrowly missing her head. As she turned to look, three enormous, bony arms clawed their way out of the building's exit wound. She winced. No doubt the witch that used to be the girl she was just fighting. As she readied her weapon, she felt a small degree miffed at forgetting until now that she said she would be studying for her finals tonight.

"Four!"

Hüriye's eyes snapped open. She stumbled backward into her turntables and stopped them silent. Instantly, all eyes in the room were upon her. She grinned. Her mind swam with the infinite possibilities self-realization brought. She knew the way to a joyous and fulfilling life. She loved herself, and she knew that the corner of the universe she called a self loved her back. She knew that when she woke up tomorrow, it would be to the first dawn on a perfect life, one where she could-  
Huh?

Oh, shit. The music.

"Three!"

The youngest daughter of an eons-ancient force of destruction stirred from her sleep, woken by the counting down of the humans ignorant enough to believe themselves her parents. For a moment, she thought she saw a shadow by her doorway - poised like a cat, but with longer ears and a bigger tail - but when she rubbed her eyes and blinked, it was gone.

She was hungry. Hungry in a way she didn't know other people weren't. She didn't understand what the urge really *meant* she wanted. This feeling was normal to her, but she had never quite satisfied it, and she assumed it was something that would come and go as a standard part of growing up. In a sense, it was.

Every child on the path to becoming a teenager wanted to destroy the universe. What made her so special was that she could actually pull it off.

"Two!"

Beyond the limits of the universe as all of the above understand it, untouched by the white lies called time and space, a brilliant deity draped in a flowing black cloak writes by the deep blue light of her soul gem. Her words are inert as she pens them, but their meaning is alive and dynamic, shifting into the shape of a cosmos.

This cosmos, too, is filled with life where she wills it - or does it will her to write? Which one informs the other? - life which understands itself through the words she builds them from. She is the speaker-god, and her words and the universe are one and the same.

And she's mighty humble, too.

"One!"

When Marie stepped out onto the street, the warm summer air struck her like the kind of blow she imagined a kind and charitable God would have reserved for that bitch Macquarie. She took it in stride, though; her eyes were fixed on the illuminated city skyline and the shimmer of the lights upon the harbour. And by her feet, another pair of eyes, beady and scarlet, joined her.

"Happy New Year, Kyubey."

"Happy New Year, Marie."

**PUELLA FURIA DARK MAGICA**

**PART 1: UNTIL THE DARK**

* * *

DARK MAGIC

Dark magic has been a phenomenon observed among magical girls since before the evolution of the modern magical girl (Puella Furia), and well documented and understood since close to the invention of the written word. In practical terms, dark magic is the manifestation of a more volatile soul's - say, one contained in an external receptacle - willpower, in manners which affect the world without the soul.

Dark magic, true to its name, does not interact electromagnetically, and thus cannot be observed by an individual who is incapable of perceiving their surroundings without a body's sensory organs. Typically, this restricts observation to magical girls (in the various stages of their life cycle) and those similarly aware of their souls as in, for instance, the Incubator. There are, however, exceptions to this rule, as dark magic is capable of interacting with matter and energy through the other fundamental forces (including those not yet theorised to exist by the soul-unaware). To use a practical example of this function, consider illusion magic, which manipulates light according to the will of the soul rather than directly being observable itself.

As advances in the understanding of dark magic continue, the phenomenon's discovery is misattributed to significant contributors to the study of magic. These include Penelope of Skyros (310 BCE - 291 BCE), for her use of it in elaborating on the Aristotelian conception of a "fifth element", Aisha bint Hassan (703 - 739), the first person to write the equations for dark magic stability and its relation to emotional energy usage when her trail of thought became derailed while she was trying to figure out how to fit a rolled-up rug through the front door of her house, Anneliese Holzknecht (1828 - 1871), whose extensive writing on the matter had resulted in the SI unit for dark magic being named the Holzknecht (abbreviated as Hk), and who had invented both the time paradox and being found dead 7000 kilometres from the last place you were seen, and Rachel R. Parker (1981 - 2002), who had actually coined the term.

Parker's coinage of the phrase came about in 1998, in response to the discovery of "dark energy" named to suit the nomenclature established by dark matter. She had come up with it during a game of table tennis, wherein she had joked that if the name ended up sticking, the entities whose bodies were comprised of dark magic would have to be renamed to "witches" and "familiars" and was shocked to discover the following week that this was exactly what had happened. What she was not shocked to discover, however, since neither she nor anybody else ever knew this, was that mere days after she made this joke, a woman in another country altogether was giving birth to an immaculately conceived child. Had she known, her entire understanding of consciousness and free will would have been thrown into question and it's entirely possible that this would have made her feel less bad about the joke in comparison.


	4. The Coffee's Rubbish and the Bacon's Always Hard to Chew

"All of us are here because we made a choice! All of us are here because we sold our souls for something more important to us! That's a sign of courage, and of charity, and no matter who we are (...) in the face of everything we need to celebrate that we have that much in common." - Lisa "Camilla Highwater" Howell

* * *

Marie snapped awake as soon as the rush of the summer sun through the window splashed her face. Secretly, she felt a disquieting weight to the rise from her bed, as if forced by the momentum of a mechanical framework carrying her through another cycle of days passing, passing endlessly in fractalline monotony.

As far as life experience had informed her, Marie was much like most seventeen year old girls, especially with regards to her age and gender. What few regards in which she deviated from her conception of average were largely superficial (for instance, she was fairly albeit unremarkably shorter, and her hair was so fair as to almost appear silver), save for the fact that she had spent the last four years of her private life documenting whatever she could about the existence of magic despite refusing to partake in it herself.

This particular fact, while likely not unique to her on a global scale, was so unprecedented that the Incubator had permanently assigned one of his bodies to remain on standby in case of her contract formation, but if she had noticed this, she hadn't said anything. He had considered pretending to be offended by this, but as far as he knew, she wouldn't understand the purpose of the act unless he spelled it out for her.

In the midst of her introspective reverie a generally-still-bleary Marie bid the current of routine sweep her up into a completely unremarkable beginning to a completely unremarkable day. Her first step of the day, as it was more often than not, was to bid good morning to her father idly from the balcony - that is to say, a safe distance.

"Hey, Dad. Morning."

"Oh! Hello, Marie. Happy New Year!" He forced a grin. For some reason, smiling had never seemed to suit him, which was much to Marie's chagrin because he did it rather often.

He stood out in the backyard, mug of coffee in one hand, the other hand bearing a watch he would often impatiently glance at for no reason at all. He stared out at the Sydney skyline in the distance, occasionally exhaling a silent chuckle and shaking his head. "So this is the life," he thought to himself, because he remembered someone telling him this is what successful people think.

Thomas Crawford was, in the words of the people who had worked for him, "a cheerful, eccentric, and very personable businessman", which was a polite way of saying "complete maniac". For the last twenty-five years, he had made a fortune off of his own real estate company, of which he was owner, director, and bearer of many other similar titles, most of which he'd come up with for his own amusement.

"Marie, would you mind go waking your mother up? She's gonna miss the best part of the day."

Marie tried to imagine a better part of the day than not being around her father. The best she could manage was not being around either of her parents, but with the potential advent of astral projection technology far in the future, this wouldn't be the most feasible thing in the world for her mother.

She knocked on her parents' door on the way downstairs, and figured that was good enough. It was.

Josephine Crawford was Thomas's trophy wife, and she had to make sure everyone knew that. Nobody knew why she had to do this, only that she did, and (much to her satisfaction) that that was exactly what she was. When she emerged from the bedroom in a silken bathrobe, her hair and face were already done up for the day. For a single excruciatingly silent moment, she and her daughter locked eyes. The full but measured intensity of her gaze crowned an already strikingly perfect composure, and Marie had to wonder if she had been asleep at all.

And then they both went on their separate ways, and that was that.

Marie shuffled down the stairs to the kitchen, where her brother was poking around aimlessly at a continental breakfast.

"Hey," she mumbled.

"Piss off."

"Whatever."

Tobias Crawford was just kind of there-ish, although he very much wished that weren't the case.

Marie ignored his presence as vaguely as she could, and opened the kitchen cupboard to help herself to... well, that much, she wasn't sure, and she didn't really care either. She certainly wasn't expecting to find Kyubey perched atop the cereal box, though.

Obviously, it followed that he wasn't. Marie had picked up on his mannerisms over the last four years, and he rarely acted in a manner which differed from her expectations. He was actually sitting _behind_ it, and jumped out when she lifted it up.

"How long were you waiting there?" she thought.

"Since I sat behind that box you're holding there. Isn't that obvious?"

"That's not what I mean."

"That doesn't make it any less true, though. Would you mind getting a bowl out for me, while you're at it?"

Marie made a point of only getting out one bowl from the compartment above the kitchen bowl. "Not while Toby's around. I'll feed you later, alright?"

"Future possibilities indicate this is unlikely."

"I promise I'll do it!"

"Future possibilities indicate this is now slightly more likely."

Marie sighed, and by the time she began to eat, she hoped she hadn't taken suspiciously long to prepare a bowl of cereal.

"Man! I swear you want me to look after you like some kind of cat half the time. You can't even feel grateful for it, so what's the point?"

"Our research suggests it helps reduce your stress level, and makes you more willing to trust us."

Marie paused between spoonfuls. "For real? That's so gay. I don't want to look after a pet."

"Would you prefer I took efforts to cause you stress? Some humans prefer increased epinephrine levels in their blood."

"Yeesh, alright! Be my cat, if you insist! But carry your weight! Would it kill you to meow or something every now and then?"

"Meow."

Marie went back to her breakfast. Tobias shot her an odd look, but he didn't care enough to ask her what it was she kept stopping to look at.

"You know," she offered, after some thought, "I changed my mind. That's incredibly demeaning to one of us, and I'm not sure which."

"Noted. Regardless, I just wanted to tell you that Phoebe's meeting with a friend today. After your performance last night, she cordially extends an invitation to join them."

"I'll think about it."

Her dad took that as the perfect opportunity to stride into the room. "Good morning, champs!"

"Hey," Tobias shrank.

"This is the life, eh?"

"Tell Phoebe I'm on my way."

* * *

Tucked away in the unremarkable corners of the half of Sydney to the south of the harbour sat a faux-modernist street corner café, named _The Meaning Of Life_ after the revelation which had led its founder to bring it about six years prior. It was a small-ish and plain-ish establishment, with an atmosphere so relaxed it was impossible to sincerely refer to it with any adjectives sans an "-ish" lazily suffixed to curb the magnitude of conviction any other description might imply it inspired, or indeed had gone into building it in the first place. It was the kind of café where gentrification had set in about halfway, before giving up to do something more interesting in the lives of businessmen who stare at the city skyline and tell themselves that what they are experiencing is, in fact, the life.

A bell hanging over the door rang out when Marie marched in, and her eyes met those of an enthusiatically-waving Phoebe. Sitting across from her was a wiry girl in a black jacket and torn black jeans, leaning back in her chair at an angle the field of geometry had yet to name. A waitress stood by the table, clipboard in hand.

"I'm sorry," she said. "We're all out of Coke. Is Pepsi alright?"

"Yes," Phoebe stressed. "More than alright, in fact: it's what I ordered."

"Hey! Hey," Marie stage whispered and helped herself to a third seat at the same table just as the waitress made herself scarce. The table was a heavily-varnished slab of fake wood propped up on a white iron frame running with equally fake rust. The chairs were much the same, shaped into discs upon tripodal stands.

"Well well!" The girl in black smiled. "Marie, right? Phoebe's told me about you."

"Yeah! You are...?"

"Danika. Danika Woodward. Pleased to meet ya!"

"The feeling's mutual. So why'd you call me here, anyway?"

Phoebe sat forward, and the tangle of "#vintage" light bulbs strung up from the ceiling like stalactites in a world where the process of rock erosion was a little _too_ into D.I.Y. decor magazines cast a sombre shadow across her face. "Right," she huffed. "A couple of reasons, neither of them great."

Danika waved her aside. "Nothing super bad, don't worry. Phoebe just thinks you're cool, and from what I've heard, me too. You're the girl going on four years without a contract, right?"

"Just gone it, actually. Met Kyub in late December 2004."

"Wow! That's, uh..."

"That's four years, Dani. You just said that," Phoebe explained.

"Right. Obviously."

"But yes! Even though we've only met... three or so times? And for most of those times I wasn't even Phoebe-"

"What _was_ your name, then?" Marie asked, voice soaked in the slightest tinge of guilt.

"Oh! You would've known me as Rose Dixon. Little bit taller than I am now. Brown hair. My costume was a red petticoat-type thing. I mean, we obviously didn't get a chance to know each other or anything, you just joined me on the hunt a couple of times."

"Gotcha. I think I remember you, though."

"But my point is! My point is, someone who knows as much as you do about magical society, but hasn't made a contract? Unheard of. Really useful person to have by your side at times like this, I think."

"Hang on, hang on, hang on." Marie held her hands up. "There's an entire magical _society_? Kyub, how come you never told me this?"

"You never asked," he cheered, dropping down onto the table from seemingly nowhere. Danika jumped back in surprise, but tried to make nothing of it when she remembered most people in the café couldn't see anything had happened.

"Wait," Phoebe leaned an elbow on the table. "You're telling me that after four years you never knew this?"

"I was just studying the physical properties of magic itself, you know? Like the physiology of witches and stuff. That's been my only interest this whole time!"

"In all fairness, you are very secretive about this kind of thing," the Incubator pointed out.

"Not _this_ secretive though, surely?"

"In all fairness, humans are also not very smart."

(The waitress returned, provided Phoebe with a 375 mL can of Coca-Cola, and left. Phoebe furrowed her brow and looked the can over, bit her lip and imagined words she didn't know how to say. She shrugged and partook nonetheless.)

"So true!" Danika laughed. "I'm so glad I'm technically not one."

"You are not very smart either, Danika."

"That's fair."

"Wait! Actually, this might be a blessing in disguise!"

Phoebe's three companions all stared at her.

"Sorry. Let me elaborate. This was actually one of the things I wanted to discuss. A certain Attendant and a certain Sydney community representative - no prizes for guessing who - have both been getting on my arse about missing an important meeting last night, and Hope actually brought up a really good point. Who's going to mediate between the two groups when I'm dead and gone? I mean I'm obviously not going to live forever, and there isn't really a suitable replacement completely neutral to their struggle. There's nobody who knows the needs and capabilities of your average magical girl without being swung one way or another in our local politics. Or at least... not until now."

Danika's eyes almost shone. "Phoebe! Oh my gosh, that's brilliant!"

"Sorry," Marie blinked. "You want me to devote my time to manage the drama between two groups of teenage girls?"

"Wow, no need to be so rude!"

"Nor so irrational," Kyubey interjected, and everyone groaned at his bullshit. "You understand the matter at hand to be more important than that. You're just mischaracterising the situation because you don't want to do it."

"Alright, fine. I don't want to do it. I've got my own life to live. Magical girl stuff isn't any of my business."

"You've spent the past four years making it your business."

"Yeah, just as a hobby though! I'm still a human, dammit!"

"That is correct. You are still a human for now."

"We've been over this, you fat-headed little feral. I'm not becoming a magical girl."

"I'm saying I agree with your assessment! It's true that you're not yet becoming a magical girl."

"Alright then!" Phoebe pried the two apart from what might have been a few seconds away from being at each other's throats. "Marie. What are the chances of you forming a contract soon, would you say?"

"Zero. I'm standing by that, even though _a certain someone_ isn't respecting my decision there."

"So there's still a chance!" Danika slammed a fist on the table triumphantly.

"...Yes. That chance is zero, though. Look! We're not getting anywhere. My point is, I'm turning down your offer, if it's all the same to you. What was the second matter you wanted to talk about?"

Danika grimaced, and rested her chin on a fist. "That's where I come in. See, there's a serial killer going around in our community. Came from up in Queensland to escape her past or something. Our furry little friend here is tight-lipped about the details, though."

"So how do you know he's telling you the whole truth?"

"Because my sister was one of her victims! I saw it happen! And I'm not going to rest until I'm picking the shards of her soul gem from the skin of my..."

The lights flickered and buzzed and fizzled. It was still the middle of the morning, though, so the dramatic effect this would have had otherwise was terribly stunted.

"She's here," Danika whispered, a stab of terror cutting all motion clean from her body.

"Worse," Phoebe corrected. Her companions' eyes followed her own to a short, muscular figure leering through the window. "My ex."

* * *

Francis Marlowe allowed herself a grin when, lo and behold, Phoebe Bloody Deckard stormed out of some tacky little joint named after some trite philosophical wank. What's more, she was flanked by something of an entourage now! Adorable.

"Good morning, Francis," she snapped. "You got a reason for being here?"

"Do I need one?"

The taller girl to her left chimed in. "Come on, there's no way you were here by accident. Phoebe told us you're exes, and now she's the talk of the town-"

"I'm WHAT?" Phoebe's eyes bulged wider than Danika had seen before.

"Exes in one of her lives, sure, mortal bloody enemies in another! And in retrospect, she wasn't too quick to the news in either of those lives. Yeah, Rosie. Word from the top is you were off work last night, and that Zoey Day's replacement wasn't the most agreeable person in the world. Just because you've got Attendant protection doesn't mean we aren't letting you go walkabout, got it?"

"That's what you came here for? A little light show and a slap on the wrist?" Phoebe rolled her eyes. "And Hope's fine! We just need to let her get used to the role, is all."

"You want me to tell her that? Sorry, Rosie. My soul gem looks prettier in one piece."

"Look! Look, tell her everything's under control. I'm looking for an understudy _just in case this ever happens again_ , and I'm helping track that serial killer Maddie was so worried about."

"What's... going on?" The girl to Phoebe's right mumbled.

"Right! Okay, my friends don't need to worry about this. Can we discuss this somewhere else?"

"Sure can!" Francis cracked her neck muscles from side to side. "Can't tell if you're brave or just brainless for wanting to talk to me in private, though."

"Bit of both!" Phoebe snorted a dry laugh and placed a hand on the shoulder of each of her friends. "Hey. We'll get back to everything we talked about here over the next few days, alright?"

"Sure...?"

"Sure, look after yourself."

"Of course. Dani, Marie." She nodded at each of them in turn, and Francis silently dragged her away.

"Phoebe's ex sure is intense, huh."

Danika leaned against _the Meaning of Life_ 's outer wall and watched the clouds, most of which seemed unsure if it was time for a sea breeze yet. "I feel sorry for her, honestly! With Lauren gone, she and Hope have been like sisters to me. Ha! Honestly, they deserve the world for putting up with someone so much younger than them asking them _so many questions_ all the time!"

"You're younger than Phoebe?"

"Yeah! Yeah, I'm... oh, I must be going on six or seven days old now?"

"Wh-"

"It's a whole thing. Don't worry about it. The point is, Phoebe has the patience of a saint."

"I'm sure."

"Hm."

"Hm?"

"Had no idea she was gay, though. That seems weirdly common with our lot, right? What's up with that?"

Marie's eyes shone with delight. Someone was asking her a question about magical girls that she knew the answer to! "The key thing to understand is that the survival rate among non-straight girls is a lot higher for a few reasons. I think they'd be ranked around third or so in terms of "demographic most accepting of a malleable sense of identity", and somewhere in the top five for "demographics with the most optimised average telepathic communication". The reasons behind this, I'm still not one hundred percent on? I want to chalk it up to something to do with, you know, _gay culture_ , but I can't say. I'm not gay myself, so that's really just conjecture."

"You're essentially correct," Kyubey interrupted from the rooftop without warning. "You can blame the former on experience with self-discovery and the latter on conventions of verbal communication in other cultures with heavy overlap. But you're ignoring one key factor."

"And that is?"

"By using them, we're not denting the human reproductive population."

Danika snapped to attention. "Wait, what the hell? Are you so heartless that you consider their lives less valuable?!"

"Vastly more valuable, actually. Our actions aren't informed by human prejudices, which are, of course, completely irrational. We're simply striving to optimise our factory farming of human misery."

"I... I think that's a lot worse."

"Do you? That's strange, but we don't care. Keep up the good 'experiencing emotions', by the way. You are doing an outstanding job. And Marie, if you ever want to aid the effort..."

"I'd rather not."

"I understand. I will ask again later."

"I really wish you wouldn't do that."

He craned his head to one side. "Would you be willing to exch-"

"Go die in a ditch, Kyub."

"Hostile rhetoric noted. I've moved back the next time I will ask you to slightly later still."

* * *

SOUL PHYSIOLOGY

The breakdown of the human body into distinct but interconnected systems is common knowledge, as is the function of each. Even a human, of all things, might proudly demonstrate the knowledge of how a muscular system differentiates from a nervous system and a digestive system, and so forth. It is significantly less common knowledge among Terran mortals that the soul operates in much the same way. What is, perhaps, most impressive is that only one culture among them has ever approximated a complete image of a soul's components.

That culture was the culture of Middle Egypt, and the most remarkable part of this is that what with their beliefs in the benefits of casteism, slavery, and the fear and reverence of a cosmic snake hell-bent on eating the sun, they were so immensely, devastatingly wrong about everything else.

The corporeal system ( _Khat_ , in Ancient Egyptian) is the medium through which the rest of a soul permeates. Without it, a soul is quick to collapse and disperse into small packets of emotional energy not unlike Hawking radiation. For most entities, the corporeal system is the body that soul had begun in, though the transplant of a soul into another container is a long-mastered science amongst the Incubators.

The mortal system ( _Ka_ ) can be compared to some kind of connective tissue, which gives the corporeal system the ability to bind the rest of the soul without dispersing. It connects especially strongly to the umbral system ( _Shuyet_ and _Sechem_ ), which had once been considered two distinct pieces, but has since come to be understood as one whole - that is, the influence of an entity on the world around it. Both these systems are fed heavily by the emotional energy generated in the hypothalamus, and channeled by the magical system ( _Heka_ ).

The flow of emotional energy from the brain to the soul is one of the many functions conducted by the ideal system ( _Ba_ ), which exists as the core of the entity's very being. Its functions as the human spirit itself are generally considered so vast and incomprehensible that Earth's greatest thinkers have wondered for millennia what consciousness is, where it comes from, and where it rests, completely blind to the fact that the Egyptians had already figured it out, named it a two-letter word, and called it a day.


	5. The Best Venue in this Small, Pathetic Town

Episode 5 - THE BEST VENUE IN THIS SMALL, PATHETIC TOWN

* * *

"If there were only easy answers, no choice in this life would be worth making." -Penelope of Skyros

* * *

Hope sank further and further into her armchair with every passing minute. She hated waiting. She had always hated waiting. She had been raised with a complete comprehension of life's absolute finitude, and the last thing she needed was cordoning off some of that finitude for the sake of doing absolutely nothing. Her mind needed occupation, lest it wander so maladroitly as to careen into the open embrace of a bottomless migraine. She had to keep herself occupied in the acousmatic thrum of the world around her while Phoebe et. al. remained absent in their indeterminate tardiness, she decided, or else she was going to lose her mind.

"So the thing with quantum superposition is, at least I find, it gets easier to understand if you think of each possible state as like a mathematical function," one of her flatmates, Erica, explained to another, Jane, with wide-eyed enthusiasm.

"Oh, Kimmie, me 'n' Kel had the time of our lives. We had twenny-four hour room cervix, eggs derelict for breakfast..." the television blared feebly through its blown-out stereo system.

"You, and me, we have an opportunity / And we, can make it something really good..." Zoey hummed from somewhere in the kitchen.

"Ee, ch! Ee, ch!" a thornbill outside the window begged, which, unknown to Hope, meant, "Not to bother anyone or anything, but this is my partner and I's first time making a nest, and you know, we really want what's best for our kids..."

"Eggs derelict!" The television continued. "Oh, that's noice. It's noice, it's different, it's unusual..."

"Hey Audrey, do you think you could cover my shift for me tomorrow? I've got a doctor's appointment at eleven, see," Denise mumbled, her failure to make eye contact apparent even in her voice.

"But you, you think I'm not that kind of gi-i-irl!" Zoey crescendoed, and tacked on a few extra notes of her own for good measure.

"Screw me sideways," Hope sighed. This wasn't exactly her idea of relaxing. She leaned her head out of the second-floor window and scanned the street up and down, the intersection far out to the left, the turn down the hill to the right.

The haze of January humidity clawed at her senses, caressed her face, spat on her comfort. It was tender, and it was unbearable. Every bead of sweat effected onto her face played a part in a moving symphony of warm and cool upon her skin, the fresh air in her lungs like a tide flowing on each breath a memory of her first, of terror and panic and loneliness and love, pure, unyielding love, which consumed the insurmountable hurdle at the end of the beginning of life like an immortal inferno.  
How unlikely that this thing she thought of as life should come to be, time and time and time again. How beautiful and spellbinding that everything should take its first breath, and one day its last. How unlikely that despite circumstance she was a moving, thinking thing, as imprisoned in the trillion-cut aquamarine firmly embedded on her navel as she was free in it.

Hanlon's razor would advise against attributing to malice that which can be adequately marked up to ignorance. While Hope's impatient demeanour could no doubt come across as offensive and/or self-centred in particular contexts, one should bear in mind that most, if not all mortals are under the impression that time is a real, objective phenomenon which adheres to some form of logic or other.

It is common knowledge that mortals very rarely tend toward a semblance of cleverness.

Voices from down the street. Unmistakably the forced cadence of Danika Woodward among them. Hope turned to the source. She walked between two companions - one clearly Phoebe, the other likely the "replacement" she had in mind. But the moment she saw them she noticed they weren't travelling alone.  
Hope Fearnley conjured her weapon, took aim, and...

* * *

"Oh my goddesses, Marie, you're gonna love it." Phoebe punctuated her point with an enamoured twirl. "Tell her, Dani."

"You're probably going to love it. (Love what?)"

"The Citadel! Weren't you listening?"

"Nah. That's on me."

"Hey, why do you guys call it the Citadel?" Marie asked, trying to find her own footing in the conversation.

Phoebe beamed. "For magical girls, it's the single most secure residence in all of Sydney! Not only is it-"

Thunk.

A metal rail, roughly forty centimetres long, sailed neatly past Marie's head, drove itself clean through the skull of the Incubator perched on her shoulder, and dug itself into an oblique resting place in the pavement behind her.

"What the hell?!" Marie screamed.

"Case in point!"

"That could have been my head!"

"Citadel ground rule number one: no Incubators! Bet the smug bastard didn't even tell you that!" cheered a young woman two floors up sporting a long, sleek gun of some sort. "C'mon up, girls! You're late!"

* * *

Hope ushered in her three guests with a dry sort of haste before actually offering a word of greeting.

"Phoebe. Good to see you," she declared at last.

"Likewise."

"Dazzaaa!" Hope grinned and brought Danika into a firm half-hug.

"Fearno! How's it hanging?"

"Good, good... and who's this? I see you two've brought a friend along."

She broke off from the embrace and loomed over Marie, hands on her hips but no sign of hostility on her face.

"Marie Crawford. Pleased to be of service," she explained with a slight bow.

"A posho, huh? You must be Phoebe's friend."

"Of a sort."

"Hope Fearnley. The pleasure's mine."

"She's my replacement," Phoebe explained. "You know, in case something happened to me."

Marie gritted her teeth. "Well, we don't know that yet. I'm not exactly planning on it."

"What's that?" Hope chuckled.

"Phoebe seems certain that I'm going to make a contract at some point."

"Is that so? Phoebe, you smug bitch. You're telling me your 'big plan' was a bloody 'uman?"

"Well, for now she is," Phoebe explained. "She's not caught up in our politics yet. Weren't we after a neutral party?"

"Why does everyone keep saying 'yet'?!" Marie groaned.

"Okay!" Hope snapped. "One: Phoebs, I appreciate the kinda stuff you do, and everything, but we need to have heaps lengthier discussions about getting 'umans caught up in our lives before we just drop 'em into a super important job like yours all namby-pamby, yeah?"

"You sound kind of like-" Phoebe began.

"I know what I sound like, yeah! Maybe that is pretty deeplighty of me to say! It's offside for sure, but make no mistake. 'umans? Love 'em to bits. This just isn't any of their business. And how d'you think your 'superiors' on their side are gonna take it, anyway? Really well, I don't think."

"Fair enough. Crap."

"Two: Marie, we have a saying around here. You don't choose to make a contract, you only choose what it is."

"What do you mean?" Marie scoffed.

"I mean Kyub's gonna keep hounding ya for a deal, and one way or another he's gonna find a chink in yer reasoning that he can fit himself in. It's not like turning him down is impossible, but it is unheard of."

"That's so gay. He's been trying to force my hand for four years and I've said no the whole time."

"I... hang on, four years?"

"Yeah."

Hope's flatmates began to trickle their way into the living room one by one.

"Shit," Jane announced. "Guess it's true."

"I thought you were just an urban legend perpetuated to make younger girls feel like they have more free will," Audrey laughed.

"So this is the four year girl, eh?" Zoey scoffed. "Thought you'd be taller, darl."

"Gee, thanks."

"Oi, not to be a pain in the arse," Hope declared over the murmurs of the small crowd, "but we're trying to have a conversation here."

"Righto, righto. Let's leave 'em to it," Zoey concurred, and the threat of holding a different opinion to her was enough to dispel anyone who wasn't willing to spend the next few hours listening to her talk about respect. Hope once again had her three guests to herself.

"Come on, take a seat, girls," Hope loosened up and grinned. Her guests shuffled around the loungeroom for a place to sit. Marie sat in a worn red leather armchair across the room from her. The other two took to the couch. Phoebe shuffled around nervously in anticipation of what Hope was about to ask her, mulling over her most convincingly noncommittal "well, actually," and "the thing is," in her head.

"Introductions aside, have you run this past Lara yet?"

"The thing is I think I've got to... warm her up to the idea first?"

Danika smirked. "You can say she's too stubborn. It's not a crime, you know."

"She's not as bad as you guys say she is, you know!"

"Too right!" Hope leaned forward and coughed into a fist. "See, she's actually worse."

Phoebe groaned. "I get where you guys are coming from, but... is it so wrong of me to wish the lot of us could get along?"

"Nah! Nah, totally understandable. Fat chance, though."

Danika raised her hands. "Hey, do you reckon we could at least keep it cool for now? I think in having called this meeting in the first place it doesn't really need saying that you and her can't get along."

Phoebe and Hope shrugged their agreements. The latter set her sights on Marie and steepled her fingers as if mountainous plate tectonics coursed between her wrists.

"So, Marie. Can I call you Mazza?"

"Marie's fine, thank you."

"Right, gotcha. So Marie, if I may ask: What's your deal?"

"My deal?"

"Yeah. What's your biz? What, if you will, guides your arse up our neck of the woods?"

"Yeah, tell us a bit about yourself," Danika clarified.

"Yeah, I get it. I'm Marie, I'm seventeen, and I've resisted the temptation of making a contract and becoming a magical girl for four years. In high school I was a debate club team captain-"

Hope shot a "Wow." into Danika's brain. Danika struggled not to laugh.

"-and a member of my school's lacrosse team-"

Hope upped her previous statement to conclude with an exclamation mark before deciding to wrap up this line of conversation.

"Okay, that's bonza stuff, I'm sure, but that's not so much what I'm asking. It's weird, you ask someone what they do and they start talking about academia and work and all that. I don't wanna know what wiggle room you've eked out inside your own institutionalisation. I wanna know about you. What do you do for fun?"

"Oh, uh... for fun?" Hope could tell straight away how she'd ruffled Marie's feathers. She was so prepared to give some kind of job interview type speech that a question more personal had walloped the pride right out of her.

"Yeah, if you're comfortable sharing."

"Right, yeah, nah, right. Um... not that much, I suppose? I'd say watching witch hunts is my favourite pastime, but I imagine that's already old news. I don't know outside of that, I always hate talking about myself in situations like this, you know? If there's one thing you can take for granted, it's yourself."

"I don't believe for a second there's nothing else to you. Again, though, if you're uncomfortable..."

"No, it's cool. Just let me think... uh, looking after Kyub? I treat him like a cat, as it happens. Except I talk about moral philosophy with him sometimes. I'd say that's a hobby of mine too. What else? Old point-and-click adventures? Trying to teach myself piano? Reading?"

"Ah yeah? Reading anything good at the moment?"

"Oh! Yeah, actually. You ever read any Atwood?"

"Know the name, haven't checked her out. She any good?"

"Yeah, I really like her style."

"Cool, cool. Hey, would you mind if I just confer with my friends about some stuff? I'm pretty new to what I do, and if we brought you on board that'd be a pretty major undertaking for both of us."

"It's okay," Phoebe protested. "I can train her!"

Hope shrugged. "Yeah, that's fair. Now it'll be a major undertaking for three of us."

Marie quirked an eyebrow. "Go... right ahead."

Hope smiled and sat in silence for about two seconds. "Yeah, we don't think you're right for the job."

"Wait, what? Weren't you about to ask around about that?"

"Just did, son. Mind to mind. We don't think you're cut out to be a neutral party between us and the deeplighters, unless you show us something pretty specky you've been keeping up your sleeve until now."

"Please, Hope," Phoebe whined. "At least give her a chance."

"No, it's cool. I don't even want this job."

"Et tu, Marie? I can't think of a better fit to be my understudy. Come onnnnnn, there's so much riding on your shoulders."

"Hm! I don't think there is, actually."

"That's a tad tactless!" Hope cringed. "Not that I disagree with you, mind."

The existential panic Phoebe shook her head with as she gawked back and forth between Marie and Hope would put Jean Buridan's horribly mistreated and malnourished ass to shame. "But you told me upholding this peace is everyone's responsibility!"

"Okay, that's true..."

"Mmmmmmmmm," Marie winced, "not mine!"

Phoebe shot to her feet and clutched her skull (still contained within the flesh of her head, of course. Only one person with even the most tangential relationship to her life is intense enough to do otherwise). "I can't deal with you people! I can't... I'm... I need some air."

"Need me to come with?" Danika piped up.

A sigh. "No, it's fine, I'll... I think I might go home, actually. I'm sorry."

"No, don't be-" Hope began, but before she could enunciate the last syllable strung onto that thought, the only person who needed to hear it was out of earshot.

Hope sank in her chair. That was the first she'd seen Phoebe all week, and so quickly she'd just...

"Far out," she mumbled. "Guess this is a pretty crap first impression, eh, Marie? I swear I'm not usually this tense. I'm sure Phoebe is too, sometimes she has trouble balancing her souls and, well..."

Marie shrugged. "I'm used to magical girls being super sensitive about everything. Best I can tell it comes with the territory."

Hope refined her casual slump into a full-blown, masterful sulk. "I may be an overemotional majjo, but at least I'm not a bloody 'uman."

"What do you mean?"

"You lot think you're tough stuff 'til you lose an arm or something. Then you completely spit the dummy 'cause you can't grow it back."

Danika clapped her hands together, this time less forcefully than she'd meant to. "Right! Right, I think we are all under quite a lot of stress right now, what with a serial killer on the loose, and Lauren and Dante six feet under-"

Hope rolled her eyes. "D'you think you could at least call her by her name now that she's carked it?"

"...Lauren and _Sonia_ six feet under. I think we're all just very worked up by this... this, uh... look, I'll just go talk to Phoebe. Yeah?"

"Righto. Chur, brah."

Marie furrowed her brow. "Chur, brah?"

"Yeah."

"What language is that?"

"Well, English. Only language I know."

"I don't think you'd find 'chur' or 'brah' in any dictionary, actually."

Danika slipped out before she could get caught up in the crossfire of whatever the hell this was.

"Oi, Erica! Could you get in here real quick?" Hope shouted.

Erica popped her head in through the kitchen door, mop of raven hair swinging back and forth with the urgency she'd arrived. "Hello! Yes?"

"Chur, brah."

"No worries, brah," she grinned, and slipped back out.

"That doesn't prove anything."

"Crikey. You know you sound a lot like Phoebe's mate right n-"

Hope's jeans pocket blared a harsh, percussive synth monotone. She noticeably flinched before practically ripping her phone out of her pocket and putting it to her ear.

"Hold on, lemme take this. Hello?"

"Lordy. What's she done now?"

"Yeah, nah. Next time though. Deffo."

"Right! Yeah! I'll send her down, then!" She held her phone aside and turned back to Marie. "It's Dazza. Phoebs wants to talk to you. In person."

"Oh, uh... now?"

"Yeah, bloody now!"

"Right! Well, then, um..." Marie eased herself back to her feet. "Nice to meet you, anyway."

"Nah, be real. It sucked."

"Haha, yeah, it kind of did."

Marie was about halfway through the door by this point. Hope saw the closing of the window of time in which either of either of them could swallow their pride, and she slipped her hand through. Worse things had crushed her wrist, after all.

"Oh! Um, one last thing before you go."

"Hm?"

"We got off to a shaky start, no doubt, but I want you to know there's no room in my life to hate anybody. Okay? I don't resent you just because we don't see eye to eye. And I want you to tell Phoebe I don't hate her either. I figure being three people at once would do that to someone."

"Alright."

"Hah. Chur, brah."

"Sure thing." Marie responded with a thumbs-up goodbye, like some kind of absolute mutant.

* * *

"So," Hope giggled to anyone who would listen, "How's about that Marie girl earlier? What a weird unit."

Zoey shook her head. "Yer drunk again, aren't ya, darl?"

"Nah. Course I'm not drunk. Watch this. Song's ending."

"What?"

"Song's ending."

Every weekend, Denise and Jane would insist on watching the first two hours of an all-night music video program run by the ABC, as part of a friendly but, to an outsider, alarmingly ritualistic competition based around naming as many songs as they could before their title faded in at the bottom of the screen. Only one other Citadel resident ever expressed the slightest interest in the game, and she was banned due to her level of skill.

A fast-paced rock beat started up. Before the first bar had ended, Hope bolted to her feet and pointed at the television.

"Faker - Are You Magnetic." She took on a quick sip of the beer she had been holding. Other people said it tasted like cat piss. Hope had, of course, never tasted cat piss, but she was very much concerned for the wellbeing of any animal capable of producing a fluid half as foul as the one in her hand. "It's track two off Be The Twilight. Too easy."

Her flatmates groaned and accused her of cheating somehow, or failing that, just being a real buzzkill on her own merits.

"That don't prove nuthin'," Zoey sighed, "save that I deferred my authority to a girl with an encyclopedic knowledge of contemp'ry Aussie music."

"I dunno, I thought my reaction time was pretty good. I promised you I wasn't gonna drink to get drunk this year. You've got faith in me, don't you Auntie?"

"Course I got faith, darl. I just worry I stuffed up leavin' as much on yer shoulders as I have."

"You don't think I'm capable?"

"Nah, wouldn'ta picked you if I didn't. Yer just quick to stress is all."

"I'll drink to that," Hope concurred, raised her longneck to her mouth, and put it back down when she realised what she was doing.

"Force a' habit?"

"Yeah, well-"

A quick, firm knock resonated through the front door, and into the air of the apartment like venom into a bloodstream.

"I'll get it," Hope announced. She opened the front door, saw who was behind it, and closed it again.

Lara jammed her foot in the door before it could close. "Evening, Fearnley," she cooed. "Would you mind if I popped in for a chat?"

"If I said no..."

"I'd find other, less courteous ways to open this door, don't you worry."

Hope weighed her options, sighed, and swung the door open.

Lara inferred the rest of the invitation in. "Evening, Ms. D!"

"Oh, piss off. What the hell's she doin' here?"

"Evening, all. Wowza! This place looks like a grandma in the outer suburbs decided to open a crack den." She threw her soul gem onto the ground. "Look. I'm unarmed, and if you think I'm going to misstep, just shoot me through the soul. You can trust-"

"Oi, shut up and say what it is you came here to say."

"What I came here to... ah, right! Deckard's understudy. How are you feeling about her, Fearnley? I mean, I haven't had the chance to meet her yet, but I think our current diplomatic scapegoat's shirking her duties, right?"

"What do you mean...?" Hope looked aside at Zoey. Had she missed a memo or something? Zoey just shrugged.

"I mean I think it's bad practice for her to devote all her teachings to some rando who doesn't give enough of a shit to so much as take a step outside her body instead of, I don't know, stopping someone from starting a bloodbath in one of the southern hemisphere's biggest metropolitan areas."

"Why, are you planning on being that someone?"

"Nobody plans on being that person. It's a nothing-to-gain, everything-to-lose situation. It's like when there's that girl from the fancy private school who doesn't even know you exist, but you treasure every moment you spend with her, and you so *badly* want to tell her that she's the most enchanting soul the big man slam-dunked down onto this bastard Earth, but deep down inside you know you're not ready to admit that you could be in love with-"

"Lara?"

"...Right. Of course. You were homeschooled, right?"

"Yes?"

"Well, it's basically a universal experience. Don't worry about it."

The room went silent for a moment.

"I'm not weird," Lara clarified.

"Can we cut to the chase?" Zoey offered. "I'm gettin' even sicker of ya than I already was."

"My point is! Miscommunication, misunderstanding... in a situation as tense as ours, they can be lethal. Someone who can see our arguments from both sides like her is a lifesaver. And this girl she's macking on or whatever doesn't want to see any of our world from any side! You see my hesitance to let this slide, right, Fearnley?"

"Fair suck of the sauce bottle! From what I can tell, that girl has a willingness to learn I never woulda saw coming."

"I see. What else has she got going for her?"

"Bugger all, really."

"Shame. What's say you and I underthrow Deckard and find a new girl ourselves instead?"

"Under... throw?"

"It's like overthrow, but she's our inferior. She's really, really inferior, actually. You know how she spends her time? Going on witch hunts with this new girl just for kicks. I hear Woodward - not the dead one, of course - is third-wheeling whatever it is those two have got going on now."

"Pull the other one. You're trying to undermine my judgement, or something. Trying to get me to disapprove of Phoebe's choice of student."

"Why, were you about to give her the go-ahead?"

"No, I-"

"Well then, why would I do that?" She smirked. "Face it, Fearnley. If I needed to psychologically outplay you, I wouldn't resort to spreading rumours. I've got a rapper wit."

"You mean a rapier."

"A what?"

"She said rapier," Zoey huffed. "That's the expression. Rapier wit."

"What, like a sword? That's stupid. The only thing a sword ever thinks to do is cut something, and that's only because somebody else tells it to. A rapper, on the other hand-"

"Right, right. You've made your case, I'll think it over. Now piss off."

"Alright! Goodness gracious, you're so impatient sometimes!" Lara shook her head and picked her soul off the floor. "I just swung by to try and help both of us in a time of need, and here you are, biting my head off. I feel like Christ on the cross, I swear."

"Explains why you think you're God's gift," Zoey mumbled.

"Don't worry, Ms. D. I've got plenty of reasons to think that already." She turned and flipped her hair dramatically, stepped through the doorway, and

paused.

"One more thing, actually. That friend of Phoebe's. Did you get her name? She must have forgotten to tell me."

Hope hesitated. Giving the name of a human, particularly one Lara saw as an obstacle, might as well be a death sentence. And yet, and yet...

Lara knew Lauren Woodward was dead. She wasn't the type to be easily deceived. So making something up was out of the question.

"No, sorry. The two of them only stopped by in passing, really."

"...Shame. Oh well! Night, Fearnley. Night, Ms. D."

"I'll give you thirty seconds to get your fat arse off the premises."

Lara slammed the door shut behind her. Hope returned to her seat and gulped back her longneck.

"Hope, darl..."

She put the beer down and rested her temples between thumb and forefinger. "I'm so sorry, Auntie. If you wanted me to stop drinking, you should've given someone else your job. What am I supposed to do when she's out there vying for more leverage in her community and the most I can do to stop her is go along with it?"

Zoey rested a hand on Hope's shoulder. "No, darl. I'm sorry. I'm asking a lot, I know. If there were easy answers, it wouldn't be a choice worth makin'."

Audrey marched into the room looking for all the world as if she hadn't slept in quite a while. "Hey, nobody's seen those blue socks I've got around anywhere, have they? I need them for tomorrow."

"Bad time," Zoey sighed. "Lara swung by just now, 'bout as exhaustin' as a stroll from here to Alice. Give us two ticks."

"Oh. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Is everything alright?"

"Eh. She'll be apples. For now, though, I reckon you and Hope both should get some shuteye. You both look pretty zonked."

Hope lowered her hand and forced a half-smile. "Yeah, sure. I s'pose I am. Thank you, Auntie."

* * *

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OTHER SIDE

One of the most fundamental axioms in fathoming the influence of magic upon reality in full is the fact that magic itself is shaped by the emotions of its source. Thus it follows that the shaping of reality is an entirely subjective process, as the individual experiences and choices of distinct, unique beings serve to define the rules and structure of the very reality in which their experiences and choices occur. So what came first, then: reality, or the will to shape it?

A key component of Einsteinian relativity is the notion that there is no universal reference frame, no point in time and space whose perspective of other points in time and space are more "objective", if you will, than any other. This is, strictly speaking, true, but it does not necessarily disqualify the existence of a universal reference frame *outside* of time and space. Consider, if you will, the speaker god, unrestrained by boundaries of time, space, probability, and thought. And yet, as she speaks every instant, every singularity, every possibility, and every concept into being, they are all completely visible from her panopticon of nothings. The universe is both her speech and the amphitheatre from which she speaks it.

But a solipsistic orrery strung up with all of time and space and every notion both physical and metaphysical is a dense one indeed, and there are countless points where different notional syzygies radiate from her line of sight. Suddenly, seemingly unrelated pieces of information can intertwine themselves in facets difficult for mortals to notice, let alone understand. They become, for want of a better word, metaeclyptic.

The Citadel, like all things, is metaeclyptic with an infinity of other things, places, times. One of these things happens to be a lighthouse on the west coast of Ireland, operated by a young man named Douglas Murphy. Though neither of them knew it, at the exact moment Audrey Wong lost her blue socks, he found a pair of green socks he had lost four months ago. The strangest part of all this, he would remark if he understood his circumstances to any meaningful degree, is that his role as a textbook example of metaeclypticism is, in fact, the only meaningful reason for his existence at all. The speaker god has, as it happens, written a proverb pertaining to this feeling of existential ennui, which goes as follows.

From here until the end of the last chapter.

It also goes as precedes, until the beginning of the first.

Due to the impracticality with which one might quote it, it is considered a very unpopular proverb.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Hey guys. Sorry for the long wait that's come with this chapter. A family emergency had come up and dealing with that had pushed everything else in ym life back a bit. We'll be back on schedule next week, at which point I'll delete this note. See ya then!)


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